Step Three

Here's the alphabet I'll be fontifying for you today:

I decided to call this one "Gobbler," and the original artwork is shown here at the actual size. I drew it on a napkin while having breakfast at the Modern Cafe in Minneapolis. I like the way the napkin randomly absorbed ink to create interesting splotches at the ends of the strokes.

When drawing your alphabet, keep in mind that it'll be troublesome if the characters overlap. If they do, you'll have to cut them apart later. So I'd recommend keeping each letter separate from the others, and leaving plenty of space between the lines.

I scanned my napkin into Photoshop at 100% (as seen here) at a resolution of 200 pixels per inch. My computer sucks, but if you've got one of them fancy new computers you might want to scan it in at 300 dpi. Whatever. I'm a lo-fi guy.

Next, I'm gonna take the alphabet into Streamline to convert it from a grayscale PICT file to post-script outline format. Streamline lets you control the detail of your image based on details per inch, so I need to make it bigger to get the detail I want out of it. In Photoshop under "Image: Image Size" I "uprez" the image to about 8.5 inches by 11 inches, at around 150 dpi. Now I'm ready to exit Photoshop, so I save the file as a grayscale PICT with no compression.

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